Tag Archives: Conquistadors

There are a lot of directors who work with that special someone of an actor forging a partnership that becomes legendary within the cinematic world. Martin Scorsese had Robert DeNiro. ohn Ford had John Wayne. And German director Werner Herzog had Klaus Kinski. If you know anything about Klaus Kinski, this may seem a bit of a raw deal for Herzog. After all, as far as anyone knows, John Wayne never tried to knife Jon Ford to death on the set of a movie, and Robert DeNiro never insisted to Marty that he was the reincarnation of Jesus or the famed violin virtuoso Paganini. On the other hand, it’s equally unlikely that Scorsese has ever returned a knife fight with his own conspiracies to murder his favorite leading man. Although one has to question the authenticity of some of the wilder tales about the working relationship between Herzog and Kinski, there’s no doubt that some of it was indeed true and they had the sort of relationship that could be described, if one wanted to be tactful about it, as “dynamic.” The defining factor in the relationship between Herzog and Kinski was that Kinski was, to use a scientific term, bat-shit crazy while Herzog, in turn, was crazy as a shithouse bat. Yet somehow, you throw the two together, and the result was sheer brilliance etched from utter lunacy.